futureevilscientist:

strawberry-crocodile:

There is no shared white history. Europeans all hated each other from the first settlers up until the 1500s. No Italian has even fucking heard the word “Odin” until long after (”white”) christian missionaries nearly eradicated that religion. If  you and I are both white than our ancestors probably fucking hated each other. Hell, if you’re a white mutt like me, various roots of your own family tree fucking hated each other and considered each other foreign savage barbarians. The only thing that unifies the white race is skin color and privilege, and neither of those things fill me with any kind of pride.

It is my understanding (speaking as a “white” girl from Russia and Ukraine living in Europe) that “white” as a concept literally didn’t exist until people in the US realised their country was now made up of A) a bunch of people from England and Ireland and France and Spain and Poland and Russia whose historical hobby has consistently been going to war against each other, and B) black people who were interested in defending their own interests.

The “melting pot of cultures” people refer to in regards to the integration of immigrants in the US actually refers to the forceful erasure of cultural and ethnic differences to create a unified front and an “us vs. them”, with “them” being black people.

It’s notable that while anti-black (anti-Indian, etc.) racism exists in Europe, e.g. the UK, bigotry exclusively along ethnic lines (anti-Irish hate crimes, anti-Slavic hate crimes) is also still perfectly alive and well, even though it’s bigotry against peoples that according to the US model would fall within the same “white” monolith and therefore supposedly are the same, or something.

I had a really interesting experience on a forum once (with a mix of US and non-US members) where people discussed the movie Taken and whether the Albanian antagonists featured in it were “white”. The disagreement was quite telling - to US members, they looked “white”, but to European members, they looked “yes white but still Other and Other in a way I would immediately pick up on from subtle differences in their appearance if I ran into them in the street”. Because that’s a thing too. When bigotry based along ethnic lines is actively practised, you learn to pick up on whether someone looks Polish, or Greek, or Georgian.

The fact that people from different countries often can’t agree on, bluntly, whether a group would be seen as Other/discriminated against where they’re from, speaks volumes as to how constructed the concept of whiteness or being the “right” race/ethnicity really is. Racism and anti-ethnic discrimination exist because those in power are served by there existing a specific ethnic or racial underclass, not because of any shared history or shared nature.

Hell, even the Nazis couldn’t stick to their “Aryan” model with any consistency, because while Jewish people, Romani people, and the entirety of Slavic people (Generalplan Ost) were seen as subhuman and subject to extermination or subjugation, a number of ““““honorary Aryans”“““ was still declared because of political interests (or sth idk), a list that included people from Finland, Japan and Turkey.

Tl;dr: Historically, people can and have found any excuse to Other a specific group when it suited them. People who talk about a shared history or shared interests are trying to sell you something.